"Dictating Forms: Authoritarian Power in the Latina/o American Novel"

Jennifer Harford Vargas completed her undergraduate work in English and Latin American Studies at Miami University, graduating summa cum laude.  She received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Humanistic Studies to begin her PhD work in the Department of English at Stanford University and was later awarded Stanford’s newly created Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship.  She currently co-coordinates the TransAmerican Studies Working Group at the Humanities Center and is a Graduate Scholar-in-Residence at El Centro Chicano.  Her dissertation, entitled“Dictating Form: Authoritarian Power in the Latina/o American Novel,” identifies and examines a corpus of contemporary U.S. Caribbean and Latina/o novels that expands the formal and geo-political contours of the Latin American dictator novel.  Her work demonstrates how these writers are using the resources of the novel to articulate intersecting connections between authoritarianism, imperialism, and racism in the Americas.  “Dictating Forms” ultimately contends that these novelists are generating a transAmerican counter-dictatorial imaginary, thereby developing a new idiom for depicting and theorizing power in Latina/o literature.